It has been a year since this column was begun in a myopic spurt of enthusiasm that now shows signs of waning. The frequency with which essays were thrust on an unsuspecting and democratic internet has been steadily decreasing, and every minute spent on the computer is a minute taken away from something more substantial in the constant reprioritisation that is today's urban life.

Together we have chartered all kinds of waters-- a gamut ranging from politics to sports, history to literature, and religion to popular culture. The writing has been uneven, from the spontaneous and passionate to the laborious and mundane. Through it all, the common threads have been personal experiences and selfish opinions (with the slightest attempt at impartiality) on topics that are meaningful only to the writer.

Among the kind criticisms received from various quarters, for which I am deeply grateful, is an oft-repeated question about the exact purpose of these scattered thoughts. The answer is simply a desire to cleanse the mind in a coherent and structured manner. As was indicated in the preamble, in the eyes of this beholder, a weblog is more akin to an online public diary and serves no other noble aim of either systematising all of human knowledge (à la Encyclopedia Britannica) or "to go with thee and be thy guide" (as Knowledge told Everyman in the medieval play bearing the latter's name).

Interestingly, the emerging pattern of serialising famous literary diaries in blog-form suggests that our most profound bloggers are now dead. From Samuel Pepys to George Orwell (with more projects to come undoubtedly), publishing the everyday observations of these literary stalwarts makes them intimately available to a new generation, while revealing that notwithstanding the garb of modernity and complexity, the thoughts that we think alone are not that different from those of our forefathers.

1 comment:

Your blog postings are of very high literary and intellectual order. I am sure that there are others like myself who read them to find new facts and interpretations about various facets of life. Keep up the excellent work and let not the enthusiasm wane.